US/Israel Challenged on Iran

US/Israel Challenged on Iran

The times may be a-changin' - at
least a bit - with the United States and Israel no longer able to
dictate to the rest of the world how crises in the Middle East must
be handled, though the new reality has been slow to dawn on Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and her neocon friends in Congress and the
U.S. media.

They may think they are still in control,
still the smart ones looking down at upstarts like the leaders of Turkey
and Brazil who had the audacity to ignore U.S. warnings and press ahead
with diplomacy to head off a possible new war, this one over Iran.

On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced
success in persuading Iran to send roughly 50 percent of its low-enriched
uranium to Turkey in exchange for higher-enriched uranium that would
be put to peaceful medical uses.

The tripartite agreement parallels
one broached to Iran by Western countries on Oct. 1, 2009, which gained
Iranian approval in principle but then fell apart.

That Monday's joint announcement
took U.S. officials by surprise betokens a genteel, ivory-tower-type
attitude toward a world that is rapidly changing around them, like old
British imperialists befuddled by a surge of anti-colonialism in the
Raj or some other domain of the Empire.

Tellingly, U.S. officials and their
acolytes in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) could not bring themselves
to believe that Brazil and Turkey would dare pursue an agreement with
Iran after Clinton and President Barack Obama said not to.

However, the signs were there that
these rising regional powers were no longer willing to behave like obedient
children while the United States and Israel sought to take the world
for another ride into a Middle East confrontation.

Standing Up To Israel

In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu was so upset with President da Silva's advocacy of dialogue
with Iran that he gave the upstart from South America a stern lecture.
But the Brazilian president did not flinch.

Da Silva had grown increasingly concerned
that, without some quick and smart diplomacy, Israel was likely to follow
up a series of escalating sanctions by attacking Iran. Mincing no words,
da Silva said:

"We can't allow to happen in Iran
what happened in Iraq. Before any sanctions, we must undertake all possible
efforts to try and build peace in the Middle East."

Turkey's Erdogan had his own face-off
with an Israeli leader - shortly after Israel's three-week assault
on Gaza from Dec. 17, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009, in which some 1,400 Gazans
and 14 Israelis were killed.

On Jan. 29, 2009, the Turkish president
took part with Israeli President Shimon Peres on a small panel moderated
by the Washington Post's David Ignatius at the World Economic Summit
at Davos, Switzerland.

Erdogan could not abide Peres's loud,
passionate defense of Israel's Gaza offensive. Erdogan described Gaza
as "an open-air prison," and accused Peres of speaking loudly so
as to hide his "guilt."

After Ignatius allotted Peres twice
as much time as he gave Erdogan, the latter was livid, and insisted
on responding to Peres's speech.

The final one-and-a-half minutes, captured on camera by the BBC, shows Erdogan physically pushing Ignatius's
outstretched arm down and out of the way, as Ignatius tries to cut him
off with entreaties like, "We really do have to get people to dinner."

Erdogan keeps at it, refers to "the
sixth commandment - Thou Shalt Not Kill," and adds, "We are talking
about killing" in Gaza. He then alludes to barbarity "way beyond
what it should be," and strides off the stage saying, "I don't
think I'll come back to Davos."

The Brazilian government also condemned
Israel's bombing of Gaza as "disproportionate response." It expressed
concern that violence in the region had affected mainly the civilian
population.

Brazil's statement came on Jan. 24,
2009, just five days before Erdogan's strong criticism of the Israeli
president's attempt to defend the attack. Perhaps it was then that
a seed was planted to germinate and later grow into a determined effort
to move forcefully to prevent another bloody outbreak of hostilities.

And that is what Erdogan did, with
the collaboration of da Silva. The two regional leaders insisted on
a new multilateral approach to head off a potential Middle East crisis,
rather than simply acquiescing to the decision-making from Washington,
as guided by the interests of Israel.

So, get over it, boys and girls in
the White House and Foggy Bottom. The world has changed; you are no
longer able to call all the shots.

Eventually you might even be thankful
that some prescient grownups came by, rose to the occasion, and defused
a very volatile situation from which no one - repeat, no one - would
have profited.

Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name

One might have even thought that the
idea of Iran surrendering about half its low-enriched uranium would
be seen as a good thing for Israel, possibly lessening Israel's fears
that Iran might get the bomb sometime soon.

By all rights, the surrender of half
Iran's uranium should lessen those concerns, but the bomb does NOT
appear to be Israel's primary preoccupation. You see, despite the
rhetoric, Israel and its supporters in Washington do not view the current
dispute over Iran's nuclear program as an "existential threat."

Rather, it is viewed as another golden
opportunity to bring "regime change" to a country considered one
of Israel's adversaries, as Iraq was under Saddam Hussein. As with
Iraq, the selling point for intervention is the accusation that Iran
is seeking a nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction that might
be shared with terrorists.

The fact that Iran, like Iraq, has
denied that it is building a nuclear bomb -- or that there is no credible
intelligence proving that Iran is lying (a U.S. National Intelligence
Estimate in 2007 expressed confidence that Iran had halted such efforts
four years earlier) -- is normally brushed aside in the United States
and its FCM.

Instead, the fearsome notion of Iran
with nuclear weapons somehow sharing one with al-Qaeda or some other
terrorist group is used to scare the American public once more. (That
Iran has no ties to al-Qaeda, which is Sunni while Iran is Shiite, just
as the secular Saddam Hussein despised al-Qaeda, is sloughed off.)

Yet, earlier this year, answering a
question after a speech in Doha, Qatar, Secretary Clinton let slip a
piece of that reality, that Iran "doesn't directly threaten the
United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies,
and partners" - read Israel, first and foremost among friends.

Clinton also would have us master the
mental gymnastics required to buy into the Israeli argument that, were
Iran to somehow build a single bomb from its remaining uranium (presumably
after refining it to the 90 percent level required for a nuclear weapon
when Iran has stumbled technologically over much lower levels), this
would pose an unacceptable threat to Israel, which has 200-300 nuclear
weapons along with missiles and bombers to deliver them.

But if it's not really about the
remote possibility of Iran building a nuclear bomb and wanting to commit
national suicide by using it, what's actually at stake? The obvious
conclusion is that the scare tactics over Iranian nukes are the latest
justification for imposing "regime change" in Iran.

That goal dates back at least to President
George W. Bush's "axis of evil" speech in 2002, but it has an
earlier precedent. In 1996, leading American neocons, including Richard
Perle and Douglas Feith, prepared a radical strategy paper for Israel's
Netanyahu calling for a new approach to guaranteeing Israel's security,
through the removal or neutralizing of hostile Muslim regimes in the
region.

Called "A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," the plan envisioned abandoning "land
for peace" negotiations and instead "reestablishing the principle
of preemption," beginning with the ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein
and then tackling other regional enemies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran.

However, to achieve such an ambitious
goal -- with the necessary help of American money and military might
-- required making traditional peace negotiations appear foolish or
impossible and then ratcheting up tensions.

Obviously, with President Bush in the
White House and with the U.S. public outraged over the 9/11 attacks,
new possibilities opened - and Saddam Hussein, the first target of
"securing the realm," was taken out by the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq.

But the Iraq War didn't go as easily
as expected, and President Obama's intentions to reinvigorate the
Middle East peace process and to engage Iran in negotiations emerged
as new obstacles to the plan. It became important to show how naïve
the young President was regarding the impossibility of dealing with
Iran.

Derailing a Deal

Many Washington insiders were shocked
last Oct. 1 when Tehran agreed to send 2,640 pounds (then as much as
75 percent of Iran's total) of low-enriched uranium abroad to be turned
into fuel for a small reactor that does medical research.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator,
Saeed Jalili, gave Tehran's agreement "in principle," at a meeting
in Geneva of representatives of members of the U.N. Security Council
plus Germany, chaired by Javier Solana of the European Union.

Even the New York Times acknowledged
that this, "if it happens, would represent a major accomplishment
for the West, reducing Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon quickly,
and buying more time for negotiations to bear fruit."

The conventional wisdom presented in
the FCM today has it that Tehran backed off the deal. True; but that
is only half the story, a tale that highlights how, in Israel's set
of priorities, regime change in Iran comes first.

The uranium swap had the initial support
of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And a follow-up meeting was
scheduled for Oct. 19 at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
in Vienna.

However, the accord soon came under
criticism from Iran's opposition groups, including the "Green Movement"
led by defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has had ties to the American
neocons and to Israel since
the Iran-Contra days of the 1980s when he was the prime minister who
collaborated on secret arms deals.

Strangely, it was Mousavi's U.S.-favored
political opposition that led the assault on the nuclear agreement,
calling it an affront to Iran's sovereignty and suggesting that Ahmadinejad
wasn't being tough enough.

Then, on Oct. 18, a terrorist group
called Jundullah, acting on amazingly accurate intelligence, detonated
a car bomb at a meeting of top Iranian Revolutionary Guards commanders
and tribal leaders in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan in southeastern
Iran. A car full of Guards was also attacked.

A brigadier general who was deputy
commander of the Revolutionary Guards ground forces, the Revolutionary
Guards brigadier commanding the border area of Sistan-Baluchistan, and
three other brigade commanders were killed in the attack; dozens of
other military officers and civilians were left dead or wounded.

Jundullah took credit for the bombings,
which followed years of lethal attacks on Revolutionary Guards and Iranian
policemen, including an attempted ambush of President Ahmadinejad's
motorcade in 2005.

Tehran claims Jundullah is supported
by the U.S., Great Britain and Israel, and retired CIA Middle East operations
officer Robert Baer has fingered Jundullah as one of the "good terrorist"
groups benefiting from American help.

I believe it to be no coincidence that
the Oct. 18 attack - the bloodiest in Iran since the 1980-88 war with
Iraq - came one day before nuclear talks were to resume at the IAEA
in Vienna to follow up on the Oct. 1 breakthrough. The killings were
sure to raise Iran's suspicions about U.S. sincerity.

It's a safe bet that the Revolutionary
Guards went directly to their patron, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, arguing
that the bombing and roadside attack proved that the West cannot be
trusted.

The commander of the Guards' ground
forces, who lost his deputy in the attack, charged that the terrorists
were "trained by America and Britain in some of the neighboring countries,"
and the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards threatened retaliation.

The attack was big news in Iran, but
not big news in the United States, where the FCM quickly consigned the
incident to the great American memory hole. The FCM also began treating
Iran's resulting anger over what it considered acts of terrorism and
its heightened sensitivity to outsiders crossing its borders as efforts
to intimidate "pro-democracy" groups supported by the West.

Still, Iran Sends a Delegation

Despite the Jundullah attack and the
criticism from the opposition groups, a lower-level Iranian technical
delegation did go to Vienna for the meeting on Oct. 19, but Iran's
leading nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili stayed away.

The Iranians questioned the trustworthiness
of the Western powers and raised objections to some details, such as
where the transfer should occur. The Iranians broached alternative proposals
that seemed worth exploring, such as making the transfer of the uranium
on Iranian territory or some other neutral location.

But the Obama administration, under
mounting domestic pressure on the need to be tougher with Iran, dismissed
Iran's counter-proposals out of hand, reportedly at the instigation
of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and neocon regional emissary
Dennis Ross.

Both officials appeared averse to taking
any steps that might lessen the impression among Americans that Ahmadinejad
is anything other than a rabid dog needing to be put down, the new most
despised bête noire (having replaced the now deceased Saddam Hussein,
who was hanged by the U.S.-installed government in Iraq).

Watching all this, da Silva and Erdogan
saw the parallels between Washington's eagerness for an escalating
confrontation with Iran and the way the United States had marched the
world, step by step, into the invasion of Iraq (complete with the same deeply biased coverage by the leading American news outlets.)

This spring, hoping to head off a similar
result, the two leaders dusted off the Oct. 1 uranium transfer initiative
and got Tehran to agree to similar terms last Monday. Both called for
sending 2,640 pounds of Iran's low-enriched uranium abroad in exchange
for nuclear rods that would have no applicability for a weapon.

Yet, rather than embrace this Iranian
concession as at least a step in the right direction, U.S. officials
sought to scuttle it, by pressing instead for more sanctions. The FCM
did its part by insisting that the deal was just another Iranian trick
that would leave Iran with enough uranium to theoretically create one
nuclear bomb.

"It's possible that Tehran will
retreat even from the terms it offered Brazil and Turkey
- in which case those countries should be obliged to support U.N.
sanctions."

On Wednesday, a New York Times' editorial rhetorically patted the leaders of Brazil
and Turkey on the head as if they were rubes lost in the big-city world
of hardheaded diplomacy. The Times wrote:

"Brazil and Turkey
... are eager to play larger international roles. And they are eager
to avoid a conflict with Iran. We respect those desires. But like pretty
much everyone else, they got played by Tehran."

Rather than go forward with the uranium
transfer agreement, Brazil and Turkey should "join the other major
players and vote for the Security Council resolution," the Times said.
"Even before that, they should go back to Tehran and press the mullahs
to make a credible compromise and begin serious negotiations."

Focus on Sanctions

Both the Times and the Post have applauded
the Obama administration's current pursuit of tougher economic sanctions
against Iran - and on Tuesday, they got something to cheer about.

"We have reached agreement on a strong
draft [sanctions resolution] with the cooperation of both Russia and
China," Secretary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
making clear that she viewed the timing of the sanctions as a riposte
to the Iran-Brazil-Turkey agreement.

"This announcement is as convincing
an answer to the efforts undertaken in Tehran over the last few days
as any we could provide," she declared.

Her spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, was
left with the job of explaining the obvious implication that Washington
was using the new sanctions to scuttle the plan for transferring half
of Iran's enriched uranium out of the country.

Question: "But you say that you're
supportive and appreciative [of the Iran-Brazil-Turkey agreement], but
don't you think you handicapped it in any way? I mean, now by introducing
the resolution the day after the agreement, you almost guarantee that
Iran is going to react in a negative way."

Another question: "Why, if, in
fact, you think this Brazil-Turkey deal
- Iran will prove that it is not serious and you don't have a lot
of optimism that it's going to go forward and Iran will continue to
show that it's not serious about its nuclear ambitions, why don't
you just wait for that to play out and then you could get a tougher
resolution and even presumably Brazil and Turkey would vote for it because
Iran would have humiliated them and embarrassed them? Why don't you
just wait to see how that plays out?"

Yet another question: "The impression
left, though, is that the message here
- sure there's a message to Iran, but there's also a message to
Turkey and Brazil, and that is, basically, get out of our sandbox, that
the big boys and girls are playing here and we don't need your meddling.
Do you not - you don't accept that?"

I almost found myself feeling sorry
for poor P. J. Crowley, who did his level best to square these and other
circles. His answers were lacking in candor, but did reflect an uncanny
ability to stick to one key talking point; i. e., that the "real key,"
the "primary issue" is Iran's ongoing enrichment of uranium. He
said this, in identical or similar words no fewer than 17 times.

That the State Department at this moment
has chosen to cite this single point as a showstopper is curious, at
best. The proposed deal offered to Tehran last Oct. 1 did not require
it to give up enrichment, either.

And the current emphasis on non-observance
of Security Council resolutions - which had been demanded by the United
States and its allies - is eerily reminiscent of the strategy for
maneuvering the world toward the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Crowley said the administration has
"no particular timetable" in mind for putting a resolution to a
vote, saying, "it will take as long as it takes." He added that
President Obama "laid out a goal of having this done by the end of
this spring" - about one month from now.

Counter-Initiative

Despite the efforts by Washington officialdom
and neocon opinion-makers to derail the Iran-Brazil-Turkey plan, it
still seems on track, at least for the moment.

Iranian officials have said they would
send a letter confirming the deal to the IAEA within a week. In a month,
Iran could ship 2,640 pounds of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey.

Within a year, Russia and France would
produce 120 kg of 20-percent enriched uranium to be used to refuel a
research reactor in Tehran that produces isotopes to treat cancer patients.

As for Clinton's claim that China,
as well as Russia are part of a consensus on the draft Security Council
resolution, time will tell.

There is particular doubt as to how
firmly China is on board. On Monday, Chinese officials hailed the Iran-Brazil-Turkey
proposal and said it should be fully explored. Russian officials also
suggested that the new transfer plan be given a chance.

Also, the proposed new sanctions don't
go as far as some U.S. and Israeli hardliners wanted. For instance,
it does not embargo gasoline and other refined petroleum products to
Iran, a harsh step that some neocons had hoped would throw Iran into
economic and political chaos as a prelude for "regime change."

Instead, the proposed new sanctions
call for inspections of Iranian ships suspected of entering international
ports with nuclear-related technology or weapons. Some analysts doubt
that this provision would have much practical effect on Iran.

Israel will be conferring with Washington
before issuing an official response, but Israeli officials have told
the press that the transfer deal is a "trick" and that Iran had
"manipulated" Turkey and Brazil.

There is every reason to believe that
Israel will search deep into its toolbox for a way to sabotage the agreement,
but it isn't clear that the usual diplomatic tools will work at this
stage, and even Israel might deem the covert action ones too risky.
There remains, of course, the possibility that Israel will go for broke
and launch a preemptive military strike at Iran's nuclear facilities.

In the meantime, it's a sure bet
that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will apply all the pressure he
can on Obama.

As a former CIA analyst, I hope that
Obama would have the presence of mind to order a fast-track special
National Intelligence Estimate on the implications of the Iran-Brazil-Turkey
agreement for U.S. national interests and those of the countries of
the Middle East.

Obama needs an unvarnished assessment
of the agreement's possible benefits (and its potential negatives)
as counterweight to the pro-Israel lobbying that will inevitably descend
on the White House and State Department.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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